So as part of the lightning talks at LCA in January, I decided to launch a little idea of mine: A catalogue (taking form as a blog) called Crowdfunded free software, aiming to record the use of crowdfunding campaigns such as Kickstarter to fund free software and related endeavours. I hope that it will be useful as both a historical record and as a resource for those who want to support free software in this way (ie to find out about new campaigns while they are still open).

I had the idea for it at PyConAU (6 months ago… ahem) when I heard someone casually mention how there had been a Kickstarter campaign to integrate South (library database schema migrations) into Django core. “How come I never heard about this?” It seemed like exactly the kind of thing I would be interested in hearing about. And as we know, when something doesn’t exist in open source, you have to scratch your own itch. But it took me a while to get my act together.

There are still a couple of dozen significant campaigns I would like to write about, and I haven’t completely figured out how to handle new campaigns, small campaigns and very poorly supported campaigns. But in the meantime, I would really like people to let me know when they hear about new free software campaigns! Either via the blog or via Twitter.

(Sidebar: the twitter name cffsw is taken although unused. This, and twitter username character limits, forced me to think of something else, which eventually culminated in crowdfundfloss. I now think this is probably a far better name than the original, which yet again shows that Naming Things Is Hard.)